Serial transmitters allow for the transmission of data sequentially by bit, over a given channel. As fast data conversion is often a necessity, high speed serial transmitters must be implemented to achieve various speed requirements. A serial transmitter may consist of, for example, a serializer in one stage followed by a driver component in another stage. A common implementation of constructing a serializer can be made by combining partial stream bit streams, such as a half speed bit stream, through a multiplexer to achieve the full speed bit rate. However, the speed of the serial transmitter is affected by the implementation of the serializer and the driver component, since the speed of the serial transmitter is dominated by the circuit implementation and design choice. A serializer may generate a full speed clock signal, which converts to two half speed clock signals used to serialize the two half speed bit streams. As the speed of transmission increases with technology advances, the full speed clock signal generation in the serializer becomes a performance bottleneck.
Thus there remains a need in the art, for a high speed serial transmitter that can overcome the speed limitations of its individual components. There further remains a need in the art for an efficient, high speed current mode driver that can combine a driver with multiplexing functionality in a single stage while operating at lower power.